Permanence

by Karl Schroeder

  Max pumped a fist in the air. "Yes! I am so good." He banged open his door and hopped out. Rue followed reluctantly. This was not the sort of place where one just dropped in; even a bumpkin like her could recognize that.

  "Max, whose house is this?"

  He was halfway around the pool. Glass doors were sliding open before him. Max turned, scratched his head and said, "Well, whose place do you think it is? It's mine, Rue."

  He went in, while she stood there with her kit bag at her feet.

  * * *

  "THERE IS ABSOLUTELY nothing like a good drink at times like this," said Max. He handed her a tumbler with some dark liquor in it.

  "Times like this?" Rue could hear a slight tinge of hysteria in her own voice, but there was nothing she could do about it. "You've had other days like this, then?" She stood in a living room of such opulence that she was sure the characters of her favorite star serial would emerge from the corridors at any second. The carpet was a self-cleaning bio-mimic, the walls held paintings on real canvas and there was even a little fountain in the corner. At the same time, there was no possible way Max could have been lying about owning the place, because every surface was covered with gaming scrip, empty bottles, dirty laundry, and ragged balls of plastic packaging. One of the paintings was askew and some sort of primitivist electronic device, with vacuum tubes and knobs, was upended in the fountain.

  "You'll be safe here," declared Max as he turned and let himself collapse onto a sock-festooned couch. "Drink up."

  Rue took a sip, then a stiff shot of the scotch, which tasted like soil and smoke. She kicked a shoe off the armchair opposite the couch and sat down, back straight.

  "Oh, I've had days like this," said Max. "The first was when I was sixteen and I won the Treya lottery. Didn't that newshound friend of yours tell you? I won twenty-seven million dites. It tore my life apart. Mother would have taken it all, you know… The second time was when I won my first Penrose Go tournament. I'm the world champion. Shit, I just started playing because I was bored." He threw an arm across his face, seemingly intent on sleeping here with one foot on the couch and one on the floor.

  Overwhelmed, she just sat and drank until the scotch was all gone and she felt ten kilos lighter. Max began to snore.

  "What do I do?" she blurted.

  "Wha?" Max blinked and sat up. "You get a good night's sleep, that's what. Tomorrow we have to face the wolves."

  "What do you mean? I'm a billionaire now, aren't I? Doesn't that give me… anything?"

  Max scowled. "Not really. You see, according to the laws of the Cycler Compact, you own the salvage rights to this starship— provided you can take possession of the cycler."

  She remembered now— there had been all kinds of legal stuff when that shuttle collided with Allemagne. Rue had been more focused on what she could get out of it herself, but her brother had talked about the salvage rights. "You normally establish your salvage on a wreck by going out to get it," Jentry had gloated. "But this time it came to us!"

  "But—" She got up unsteadily and headed for the bar. "That's crazy. I can't claim salvage unless I fly out to the thing."

  To her dismay Max nodded. "You've got to physically visit the wreck to establish your claim. If you don't within a reasonable amount of time, it'll go to whoever gets there first. And that is why you are in trouble. The cycler's going to be beyond our reach in a matter of days or weeks. Anything that's done has to be done now.

  "It gets worse, too. Think of it— this is a cycler! A cycler! We haven't seen one in… what? Twenty years? If it really is a ghost ship, its value is incalculable. Since the lit worlds abandoned us, the Compact is in trouble anyway; but as long as the remaining cyclers are loyal, it controls travel between the halo worlds. A cycler in the control of the Treya government means they could challenge the Compact itself. In other words, this cycler is valuable enough to kill for.

  "Since you're completely impoverished, there's two possibilities: either somebody funds an expedition for you— and uses you as a powerless figurehead— or they block you from going somehow, leave you scrabbling in the muck— or dead— and go out there themselves. Which is by far the better option from almost anybody's point of view. That's why they were converging on you earlier— the wolves smell blood and it's more likely to be yours than anybody's.

  "So drink up. Tomorrow's going to be a mess."

  Rue had uncorked a bottle of sherry, hoping it would taste better than the scotch. She resealed it and put her glass down. "This somebody who's going to fund the expedition," she said. "Would that happen to be you?"

  Max scratched under his chin. "Maybe."

  "So I'd be your 'powerless figurehead, then?"

  "Oh, look around you, Rue. I have money. I don't do anything with it. Why should I want more? Truth is, I've never found much worth taking it out of the bank for."

  "Then why help me?"

  Max didn't answer for a long time; he just sat on the couch like a broken doll, staring straight ahead. Finally he said, "Mother has started a court case against me. She claims I was still a minor when I won my money. It's not strictly true, but true enough… This time she's got the best lawyers and… I don't think I can win. You see, Rue, I expect I'm going to lose all of this to her and sooner rather than later. So it's a case of using it while I've got it.

  "And frankly, I can't think of a better way to thwart Mother than by making you rich beyond your wildest dreams."

  * * *

  RUE HAD STAGGERED off to sleep shortly after Max made his proposal. She lay in bed for a while thinking about what was involved in catching a ghost cycler and concluded that the whole thing was impossible. First, the starship was retreating almost as fast as light itself and for all they knew it was just a tangle of dead radioactive metal— except for the plow sail, which was an electromagnetic ramjet and presumably too hot to get near anyway.

  Whatever expedition was able to catch up with the thing would need to bring it under control and turn it. She wasn't too clear on how starships turned, but knew it was a gradual thing. It might be thirty years before they «cycled» back to Erythrion. She'd have to be crazy to throw away the best part of her life sitting in a cold metal can in the middle of nowhere; that was the existence she'd just come from, after all.

  No, it would never happen. Consoled by this thought, Rue found sleep came easily at last.

  Morning was different. She awoke to find Max already up and bustling about. He wore the same clothes as last night and hadn't showered, but otherwise he was being frighteningly efficient.

  "I've verified that there's an emergency shipbuilding order been put through by the Treya Provisional Government," he said as Rue came into the kitchen, knuckling her eyes. "They've applied to the Order for power to accelerate a cargo to point eight-five light-speed. Seems they're acting already."

  "Oh," said Rue as she peered into the fridge. "I guess that settles it, then. They got to the Compact first."

  "Doesn't work that way. Your claim has priority. If you apply to the Order for beam power, you'll get it."

  "How much would that cost?" she asked as she reached for some fruit juice.

  "Four million dites, I reckon."

  Rue nearly dropped the juice container. "Four million! You can't be serious!"

  Max looked insulted. "I'm good for it. Besides, you're going to pay me back."

  "No. No, Max, this is crazy. I just got here, I'm not going back to deep space and exile myself for half my life just to get rich. If that cycler can't sustain life anymore it would be suicide to go there anyway! Let's just drop it."

  "Admittedly we need to send a bigger than usual cargo," said Max. "Life support for several years, tools, repair equipment… But it's still doable. And what's this about exiling yourself for half your life? Look, the cycler's going to pass Chandaka in two years— that's one year cycler time. All we have to do is alter the cycler's course to bring it back past Erythrion, then climb back in our cargo magsail and coast to Chandaka. T
hen we're in FTL space. A holiday among the lit worlds, just think about it! You'll have enough credit at that point to afford an FTL ship to come back here. So you could be home and rich in two years, Rue!"

  "Oh." She hadn't considered such an option. "And if I can't change its course?"

  "Well, shucks, then we're just stuck in FTL space, on a Rights Economy world. We'll get by."

  "You said 'we. Are you coming on this… hypothetical expedition?"

  For the first time since she had met him, her cousin looked completely serious. "I wouldn't send you into something I'd be afraid to do myself," said Max.

  "Think of it this way," he went on. "I'm proposing we visit the stars. That's a once in a lifetime offer, Rue, you're not going to get it again. We'll just happen to be riding alongside, or maybe in, a cycler we've found."

  "When you put it that way…" Of course she had dreamed of visiting FTL space all her life, like anybody else. A realm where people could travel freely between the stars at unbelievable speeds, leaving the crawling cyclers of the halos behind… You could see a hundred different worlds in your life, even visit Earth. It was an unreachable fantasy for almost anyone in the halo; and the Rights Economy was nominally the enemy— it had abandoned the halo worlds, because travelling to them was so expensive. Still, the allure was intoxicating. Rue had never expected to be able to go anywhere except Erythrion, unless she emigrated to another of the orphan planets drifting in interstellar space between Erythrion and Chandaka.

  She still didn't really believe what Max was saying; maybe because of this, she said, "Okay. Why not? Let's go to Chandaka."

  "That's my girl!"

  She held up a finger. "One condition. The cycler is mine." She pointed the finger at herself. "My cycler. Mine mine mine. And my expedition. I'm the captain."

  "Fine by me. I'm not the leader type."

  "Okay." She was being reckless; it felt good. "Shake?"

  Solemnly, Max held out his hand. "Shake."

  * * *

  " F IRST THING I guess we do is apply for the beam power, right?"

  "No. Rue, that would tip our hand. Hopefully they don't know where you are right now and I don't want to let them in on it until the last minute. We do all the other essentials before they know you're even in the game. Then we pop it on them."

  Rue watched as Max transfered an unbelievable amount of money into the accounts of a dormant, numbered company he'd created years before. With a casual shrug he erased the debt Rue had accumulated for docking her shuttle and sent an offer to Jentry to buy the shuttle. Jentry would jump at it, Rue knew; the offer was absurdly high. Max's logic was that they would do best with a proven shuttle, rather than something right off the shipyard. After all, there would be no shakedown cruise for this expedition.

  This activity took most of a day; Rue might have thought it a sufficiently huge accomplishment for that amount of time, but Max had compiled a long list of things to do. By the time Jentry accepted the offer it was after six in the evening, but Max had already hired a crew to gut the shuttle and refit it for interstellar service. "Double pay if you get it done in forty-eight hours," he barked into his phone. "Rue, we need schematics and repair histories for all the major cycler designs. Download 'em out of inscape, could you? Also, we need to know how to turn a cycler if it's unpowered. If we have to separate the cycler from the plow sail, so be it. A smaller cycler is still a cycler."

  The Allemagne shuttle wasn't designed for interstellar use, but as a deep-range craft it was the next best thing. Interstellar shuttles were built as lightweight as possible, so much of what they had to do was strip mass out of Rue's, while beefing up the life support system. Among other things, this meant removing the engines and most of the fuel tanks and installing a plasma sail loop. All they would have left were some small maneuvering rockets. They would be at the mercy of the Cycler Order's particle beam launch and capture system for acceleration and braking. This was normal for interstellar travel, because a little shuttle like Rue's could never accelerate to eighty percent light-speed on its own, no matter how much fuel it carried.

  Max spent a great deal of money keeping mouths shut at the shipyard; he seemed quite adept at this sort of thing. When Rue asked him about it, he looked pensive for a while, then said, "I used to trust people. Implicitly. It's still a hard habit for me to break. But I learned to cultivate suspicion, after I got money." He didn't elaborate.

  Rue understood somewhat, because Max's mother Leda had started nosing around, being quite solicitous and friendly toward Max. Rue kept out of sight during those visits.

  Lying in Max's guestroom, she stared at the ceiling and daydreamed about cyclers.

  * * *

  R EBECCA OPENED HER door and blinked in surprise. She was dressed in a housecoat and her hair was frazzled.

  "Aren't you going to invite me in?" teased Rue.

  Rebecca laughed and embraced her. "Come in, come in, I'm just so surprised, you dropped out of sight and the rumors!" Rebecca closed her apartment door and leaned on it. "Do you think you were followed?"

  They both laughed. "Probably," Rue said. "But it doesn't matter. I'm leaving in a couple of days."

  "So it's true. You're going after the cycler."

  She nodded. "What about you? How's the job hunt going?"

  Rebecca grimaced. "Not great. But I'll survive. Tea?"

  "Sure."

  They sat for a while and got caught up. Rue spun stories of her time as a tree planter and others about Max. "Ah, I thought he might be your anonymous benefactor!" Rebecca exclaimed when Rue told where she had been staying.

  "So we're not committed to staying with the cycler for its whole cycle," Rue finished. "All we have to do is set its course and then disembark at Chandaka. If we can prove the cycler's following our course, we're rich. We should be able to afford to fly directly back here. Max thinks we could be back in two years!"

  "Incredible. Oh! The tea!" Rebecca jumped up to get it. "I'm insanely envious," she said from the kitchen.

  This was the opening Rue had been waiting for. "You don't need to be, you know," she said as distinctly as she could.

  Silence— then Rebecca poked her head out. "What?"

  "I said you don't need to be envious. I didn't come here to say good-bye, Rebecca."

  Tea forgotten, Rebecca came and stood over her. "Don't be coy, Rue. I hate that. What are you saying?"

  She smiled. "We're going to need a doctor. What if one of us gets sick a year from Chandaka? I also need somebody I can trust. I want to get to Chandaka alive, Rebecca, not die conveniently so that somebody else can take the claim. If I'm going to do this at all, I have to have a doctor. And you're the doctor I want."

  "But… I don't have my license yet! It wouldn't be legal for me to practice—"

  Rue waved a hand negligently. "I'm prepared to fund you getting your license at Chandaka. Do you think they'd refuse you a position here if you had that?"

  Rebecca sat down, hands clenched in her lap. So this is what power feels like, Rue thought as she watched the flight of emotions across the other woman's face. It was delicious.

  "Hey, you know this makes sense," she continued. "You grew up in the stations, you'd make a far better cycler crewman than any of these pudgy Treya types. You won't be afraid of the emptiness or the cold. I need that. And I need a friend."

  Rebecca looked down. "You don't know what you're asking."

  "I think I do. Will you come with me to Chandaka? I've thought about this a lot and I want you to come."

  When Rebecca looked up her eyes were shining. "Well, yes, Rue. I'll do it."

  * * *

  " I THINK WE'VE covered our tracks pretty well," said Max as he banked the aircar in the direction of Penumbra West. "There's nothing we've bought in the last few days that wouldn't be normal for a comet-mining company that's come into town to restock. It's not like you need anything special to rendezvous with a cycler."

  "Except the G-beds," Rue pointed out absently. She was
watching the ground go by; it wasn't frightening, just bewilderingly detailed; she knew she would never get used to the sight.

  He shrugged. "By this time tomorrow everybody's going to know."

  The visible wall of shadow that was the Penumbra reared up ahead of them like a translucent cliff. Bright clouds drifted into it and turned gray, then black as they merged with the eternal night beyond. Far away in that night was the monastery of Permanence. Such monasteries could be found on every halo world; they were owned by the great religious order who controlled the launch and return mechanisms for the interstellar cyclers.

  The western Penumbral lands weren't mountainous like the north. Way down below, where shadow met rolling fields, Rue could make out wide bands of alternating light and darkness. "What're those?"

  "Interference pattern. You probably didn't notice it when you were standing under them; they're pretty wide. But they shift back and forth during the day."

  She nodded. That explained why the light had brightened and faded in ripples as she'd walked the hillsides doing her tree planting.

  "You want to see closer up?" Max put the aircar into a dizzying dive. He followed a strip of highway as it exited the green splendor of sunlight. In the shadowlands, houses still dotted the sides of the road, but they became fewer and fewer as the interference bands became sparser and fainter.

  "The strange thing is," said Max, "that the houses start up again about fifty kilometers along. Not too many, mind you, but they're there. They belong to people like you who're sensitive to the light and heat. Some people just prefer the aurora light."

  The last dim band fell behind and they entered a land of permanent night. Here, in the deep twilight, someone had built a glittering glass-and-wood house on the top of an escarpment. White fungus grass grew long in the yard and no vehicles sat on the overgrown landing pad out front. It gave Rue a funny feeling to realize she was seeing a real abandoned building. Historically, the only abandoned structures in the halo were in colonies that had failed. Treya was such a vibrant, exciting place— was it possible that the seeds of collapse had been sown here?